As it has been the case in many work domains and highlighted as a societal inequality in the past years, the lack of representation of women was put in the spotlight by emancipating and feminist movements. As a result, looking at the film industry as a reflection of society across time and space, it is possible to observe trends and specificities of female characters to understand the social evolution of women’s representation. Indeed, the film industry is a product of the spectators’ expectations and social norms. However, it also impacts the viewer and can participate in popularizing new scenarios and characters, which can have on the long term a social impact. This enables identifying whether these movements were preceded by an underlying improvement of women’s condition as reflected in the film industry or whether these movements marked a societal gap. The evolution of women’s representation can be observed under three different scopes: the character’s traits such as age, their presence in the movie industry related to the number of female characters, and finally, the role given to female characters and their involvement in the plot.
Global representation of women in the movie industry
To set the stage, let’s look at the proportion of roles played by women in the whole set of movies.
Rejoicing, right? Obviously, something is wrong, but this ratio must have evolved between decades, and more recent ratios must tend to equity! Let’s look at it to fix our minds:
Ouch. Even if we might observe an increasing trend, statistically there is no significant difference between decades. This hurts, but women’s representation does not only pass through numbers, as it does not take into account a lot of aspects. One of these aspects, interesting to watch, is age distribution. As we may imagine, women tended to be represented younger than men, but numbers are better than words, look at this:
Once again, a clear tendency appears, and verifies our fears. Let’s not lose hope here, we might observe an evolution through decades ! We can see that throughout the decades, the women’s age distribution is quite shifted to the left. It tends to get better, but overall, actresses are younger on average than their male colleagues. This highlights quite a significant attribute that sticks to female character, they are younger and this gives already a hierarchical ascendancy to their masculine fellows and might be a sign of the well-renown female hyper sexualization in graphical [LUOYING YANG]. We can see also attest that the number of female characters is smaller, let’s dive into that:
 |
 |
 |
 |